Georgia’s highest court on Tuesday upheld a man’s death sentence for killing his ex-fiancée’s adult son, saying he failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he is intellectually disabled.
Rodney Young, 53, was convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the 2008 slaying of Gary Jones in Covington. The Georgia Supreme Court upheld his convictions and sentences, though some of the justices questioned the constitutionality of the state’s tough burden of proof of intellectual disability to avoid execution.
Georgia in 1988 was the first state to pass a law prohibiting the execution of intellectually disabled people, and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that the execution of intellectually disabled people is unconstitutional. But the nation’s highest court left it up to the states to determine the level of proof required.
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